Given the vast literature on the Holocaust (including Timothy Snyder’s previous book), the question may be raised: is there any aspect of the Holocaust still unknown and in need of further analysis? The book here reviewed does not provide a definitive answer and is likely to generate contradictory responses in the reader. On the one hand, one is struck by the depth of the knowledge and exemplary moral concerns of the author who probably knows more about the Holocaust, Nazism, the Soviet system, and Eastern Europe (especially Poland) than most American historians. He has read everything (in several languages) relevant to these topics and parts of the world. His heart is in the right place: he doesn’t mince words about the horrors and the human beings responsible for them.
On the other hand—and notwithstanding the claims of some reviewers and the blurbs by well-known authors—it is difficult to detect the originality or freshness of interpretation of the Holocaust that has been claimed. Nor can it be overlooked that a good deal of the narrative and its main points have already been put forward in Snyder’s widely acclaimed previous (2010) book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
While consistently interesting and informative, Black Earthdoes not hang together. There are lengthy digressions on the various disputes and propositions during the 1920s and ’30s about the resettlement of European Jews in Palestine; another chapter is devoted to Polish and Russian partisan movements during Wold War II; and
